The fire was lower than it should have been for the wood that had gone into it, but nobody moved to add more. Around them, from every direction across the camp, other fires had gone up in the camp and the celebration made its presence with voices and laughter from other arbans marking the night in their own way.

Temur’s fire had its four.

Goru was looking at Buras from across the flames. He had been for a while.

"You’re bleeding through the face wrap," he said.

"I know," Buras said. "It starts when I lay down and then when I sit back up."

"Then just stay still."

"Fuck off," Buras said. "I want to sleep this night."

He looked at his hands in the firelight. "My left shoulder’s tightened since the hall, the cut from before started itching where the physician packed it. Face is doing what it’s doing. Horse is dead and still on the citadel paving, as far as I know."

"We know all of that," Goru said.

"I don’t care, the least you can do is hear me complain." Buras retorted.

Temur had the fresh linen on his forearm from the physician’s tent, tight and new, the only recently tended thing among the four of them.

He looked at Buras across the fire.

"The physician said the wound would close if you stopped moving it."

"I’m sitting still," Buras snorted.

"You’re talking."

"Talking and sitting still are different things, do you want me to die of boredom?"

Juqa was working through the wrapped wound on his neck and said nothing about any of it.

He set it aside eventually.

"What did the distribution actually give us? In horses."

"Eight for me," Goru said. "And the linen cut. The silk went to the jaghun officer."

"Seven," Juqa said. "And the linen."

He looked at Temur.

"You said we were promised preferential. What did it come to?" 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

"In servants," Temur said. "My distribution was twelve horses and first pick of the cloth."

Goru turned his cup in both hands.

"Servants."

"The Khan named the emir’s death when he said it, probably a handful of servants."

"What did you take from the cloth pick?" Juqa said.

"The best linen for the rank. The fine silk wasn’t available for an arban captain."

Juqa nodded and looked over his wounds, "What did the physician say about the forearm?"

"Two months before I draw. He said it didn’t reach it the artery."

"That’s short for that kind of wound,"

"It’s still two months."

Goru turned to Buras.

"What’d you get?"

"Seven horses for the assault," Buras said, "plus three additional. And my horse is dead."

He paused in the way of someone adding a column.

"In total I have eleven horses, one of which I’m not riding. Because it’s dead."

"Ten," Juqa deadpanned.

"Ten live horses," Buras snickered. "I’m also keeping the saddle."

"That’s bad luck."

"It’s a good saddle. It didn’t die with it."

Goru looked at the fire for a moment.

"Before the gate."

He sighed. "When we were preparing for the push, Möge shouted his horse was done for. That it wasn’t going to make it out the other side."

Nobody answered immediately.

"He got through the gate," Juqa lamented.

"He made it into the street," Goru nodded.

Buras shifted slightly against the saddle beneath him.

"I didn’t know until we were already in the street."

Temur nodded once.

"I heard it too. Before the push."

He left it there, and after a moment the fire crackled once and the conversation moved on.

Goru started. "That citadel complex, I hate when a fight happens the way that one did. You can’t spread in a space like that, every man in a packed room with the columns cutting the sight lines."

He rolled the cup once between his palms.

"I took a spear on my horse’s shoulder from someone I never saw clearly."

Juqa snorted, "The footing was different too, the floor doesn’t take a hoof the way grass does. The horses were uncertain on it from the first stride inside."

"I’ll take open ground," Temur said. "You can see what’s coming."

"Fair enough," Goru shrugged. "Though the passage was the only way through."

"It was," Temur nodded.

Goru picked up a stick from the pile beside him and turned it without putting it in the coals.

"I knew what the Emir was before I saw his face."

He continued. "A coward. The five guards had their hands on his arms and they were walking him backward toward the rear doorway."

He glanced into the fire. "Before that I thought he was prepared to face his death in the hall, but really he was just too scared to move."

"Maybe."

Juqa said and then looked over to Temur. "And I asked whether the Khan needed him alive because if there was something to extract, the time to find out was there."

"The city was already taken and there was no orders to keep him alive."

Temur explained flatly. "But the population had a figure to hold to as long as he’s breathing."

He looked at the fire.

"There was no reason to keep him alive."

"Dead rulers stop being rulers," Goru nodded. "You made the right call."

Buras added, "He had no blade in his hands."

He said it flat. "All those men died in the hall holding weapons. His guards took shafts and cuts and died at the rear courtyard for him. The man himself stood there with nothing in his hands at all."

He looked at the fire.

"Empty-handed against his own walls."

Temur said nothing to that.

Juqa asked, "Does it matter?"

"To me it does," Buras said. "I was on foot and my face was bleeding. It matters."

Nobody argued with that.

The fire was low enough now that it gave heat without much light, the coals doing the work the wood had done earlier.

Buras lay back on his saddle and looked up at the sky.

"My shoulder," he said, "is significantly worse than my face, which is worse than the itching, and all of that is better than having no horse."

"Go to sleep, Buras," Goru rolled his eyes.

"I’m going," Buras grunted. "I’m going."

Juqa lay back without ceremony and Goru settled onto his riding coat.

Temur looked at the coals for a while longer